The first step after you add your vendors to Duoplane is to set them up to optimize your use of Duoplane and make their experience with the portal seamless.
To start editing your vendors, you can navigate to the Vendor tab, then either search for the vendor you would like to work on or click See all vendors and click on the vendor’s name in the list.
Once you’re on the correct vendor record, there are several items you’ll want to review to ensure they are setup correctly.
ProTip: Each vendor gets access to the Duoplane portal regardless of the way they exchange documents with Duoplane.
After your vendors are created and your products are assigned in Duoplane, your vendors need to know how to exchange data with you and your Duoplane account.
The first step after creating your vendors is to get them onboarding. The steps to do this are:
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Configure the vendor’s general information and other settings.
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Add a contact to the vendor record and send them the welcome email from Duoplane so they can access their Duoplane vendor account.
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Provide the vendor with any onboarding materials that are specific to your company including contact information, order processing details, or any other information they might need.
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Determine how the vendor will transact the following documents:
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Purchase orders
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Shipment & tracking information
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Inventory feeds (optional)
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Go live!
All three documents can be transacted through the Duoplane portal. Duoplane can also transact these documents in many alternate ways. The document below provides a sample template that you can provide to your vendors to determine how they would like to process orders.
Add General Information
The general information section is the basic contact and administrative information that you’ll fill in for your vendor. You can also setup a default leadtime for specific vendors, change the default currency, and even revoke access to the Duoplane portal.
Add PO Contact & Send Welcome Email
Adding a PO contact is the bare minimum you’ll need to do on each vendor record in Duoplane. This will allow Duoplane to send the vendor POs, provide certain users with access to the Duoplane portal, and determine which notifications each contact receives.
To add a contact, you can click the “Add contact” button. Fill out the contact’s information, and hit save. Don’t set a password for them unless you will be providing them with that password immediately after creating their account.
Once the contact has been added, you can click “Send welcome email”. This will trigger an email to that contact prompting them to login to Duoplane and create their password. If you need to resend the welcome email, you can do so by clicking Edit next to the contact and hitting “Resend welcome email” on the contact edit screen.
Each vendor contact can add users to their portal once they create their own account.
Set Vendor Contact Email Preferences
Each vendor contact can receive different sets of notifications:
Late Order Reports: Sent when the retailer triggers an alert to the vendor notifying them of any late orders.
Payment Reports: Sent when an invoice is marked as paid.
Purchase Orders: Sent to the vendor each time a PO is placed. The emails will be sent at the global or vendor frequency - i.e. when order is placed, every 24 hours, etc. The email will contain the selected format for the vendor - PDF, CSV, Excel, etc.
Reply-to of emails to retailers: When a vendor sends a message to the retailer using the Duoplane portal, this will be the email address that receives an alert when the retailer responds.
Return Notifications: This email address will be kept up to date on returns for their purchase orders.
Review PO Preferences
The default setting for vendors is to receive an email with order PDFs attached notifying them of a purchase order. If you need to change this to configure a vendor to receive a customized format, more information on how to set that up can be found here.
Review Shipment Feed Preferences
The default setting for shipments is to only allow vendors to enter / upload shipment information into the portal. For more details on how to do this and also on how to configure a custom setup for a vendor, you can check out this support article.
Review Inventory Feed Preferences
By default a new vendor will not be able to submit an inventory feed. If you want to allow them to upload a feed to the portal you can do so here, otherwise you’ll need to setup an alternate way for them to submit a feed. More details on how to do that can be found here.
Review Vendor Wholesale Account Settings
The default settings for vendors generally don’t need to be changed, but there are times that they might need to be customized. Some of the key settings in this section are:
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Invoices through Duoplane?
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Require PO Confirmation?
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Managed in Duoplane?